


Off-brand, Unstable Immortality

by chaturastarlight



Series: The Immortals [1]
Category: Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Don't let her tell you otherwise, F/M, Gen, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Natasha is having a bad day, Natasha loves Tony, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Red Room (Marvel), Thor (Marvel) is a Good Bro, we love thor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:01:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22869055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaturastarlight/pseuds/chaturastarlight
Summary: Everyone seems to forget Natasha was born three years after Bucky, six after Steve. She's lived a very long, and very violent life.A retelling of the twenty-eight Black Widow's, from the perspective of the last one breathing.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, James "Bucky" Barnes & Natasha Romanov, James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanov & Thor, Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov
Series: The Immortals [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1643911
Comments: 3
Kudos: 39





	Off-brand, Unstable Immortality

**Author's Note:**

> This is contains a mixture of movie and comic information, and my own personal Marvel timeline (which combines Earth 616 and the MCU based on the way I wanted to structure the universe for fics). 
> 
> It takes place in 2018, 6 years after the invasion of New York, ignores the events of Ultron and the Civil War and Infinity War ain't happening either (not that it's plot focused in the present anyways). 
> 
> There isn't "graphic" violence but since it refers to death of children, I figured I would tag on the warning. 
> 
> Enjoy!

She would like to say she remembers.

Remembers the arms of a loving mother. The soothing tones of a lullaby sung in the dead of night. Remembers the love that she hoped for years would save her from torment. She doesn’t.

She would like to say she doesn’t remember.

Doesn’t remember the other twenty-seven girls.

_Cutting off two of Alyona’s fingers before Lunch._

One.

_Snapping Toma’s neck after dinner._

Two.

_Breaking every bone in Elena’s foot as Irina stabs her in the shoulder._

Three.

Four.

Doesn’t remember the lessons they were taught.

_Standing perfectly still as Katya shoots her in the thigh._

_Don’t blink._

Five.

_Sonya shooting her in the abdomen._

_It doesn’t hurt anymore. It can’t._

Six.

_Yasmina stabbing her in the middle of the night._

_Sleep with one eye open._

Seven.

Doesn’t remember things that never happened.

_Training at the Bolshoi Theatre._

_Ballet._

_Mercy._

They injected her at sixteen years old. A year before the end of the second World War.

_Zsofia screaming until she stopped._

_She never came back through the red door._

Eight.

James brushes a metal finger across her jaw as she stares blankly at the wall. He doesn’t speak, but he’s asking a question. She doesn’t know how to answer it.

They sit in silence, the two of breathing silently in the empty space, waiting for her to find the words.

“They’re so young,” she finally says.

_Nadya killing Mila._

_The first kill in the program._

_They were six._

Nine.

Ten.

James nods, and he sits besides her. They stare at the wall together for hours, attempting to swim in the floods of the past.

Steve wouldn’t let them sit here if he knew. He would grab their right arms and haul them out for an adventure. Baking cake in the Avenger’s Tower was certainly an adventure. He thinks it’s no good to wade in bad memories. They haven’t told him that the only memories the two of them have are bad.

There are some things Steve cannot possibly understand about his friends.

_Slitting Lara’s throat for talking back._

Eleven.

_Shooting Vanna for being hungry._

Twelve.

When they fell, Steve was twenty-two. Bucky was nineteen. When he got the serum, Steve didn’t age, but he looked older. Taller, stronger, defined muscles. He looked like a soldier. Young, but someone who could command all the same. And he still looked like that.

Six and a half decades in the ice, frozen in stasis, un-aging, body unyielding- he looks the same. He falls February 1945 and wakes October 2011. Falls twenty-two and wakes eighty-nine, but he was still twenty-two. His body didn’t age, his crystalized cells didn’t process glucose, his body didn’t perform any of its bodily functions. He never aged, not a single day.

They do age, the three of them. Steve with his super serum, Bucky with his cryostasis and the Infinity Serum Fury injected into his bloodstream, Natasha with her modifications and continuous injections with off-brand, unstable, super serum in the Red Room. They age. Slowly.

There are some things Bucky cannot possibly understand about Nat.

_Sasha crying in the middle of the night._

Thirteen.

_Alla holding her hand tight as the guns go off._

Fourteen.

_Vera smiling as she sings a made-up lullaby under her breath._

Fifteen.

Bucky woke in 1954. They stole nine years from him in cryostasis. Built him- tortured him with- a new arm. Trained him. Conditioned him. Brought him to the Red Room to train the Black Widow’s.

_Misha forced to stab Emma and leave her to bleed red in the snow._

_They tumble in her blood the next day._

Sixteen.

Seventeen.

After Natasha escaped, the program fell to pieces, and they put him back in cryo and woke him only to kill. Wiped him time and time again. His body aged, slowed by constant injections and cryo.

And then Steve and his ridiculous shield, Nat and her beautiful red hair chopped above her shoulders rather than flowing down her back. The Avengers. Remembering. Forgetting. Coping. And then Fury and the Infinity Serum. And then suddenly, he’s aging as fast as the only two people his mind has cared about for the past seventy years.

Steve is thirty and looks only slightly younger. Bucky looks around forty. Natasha is thirty-two, but she has been awake her entire life. Well, except for those two years two decades ago in Budapest she spent in cryo for the first time. She’s known Clint for seventeen years now, and she’s aged less than five.

Everyone seems to forget Natasha was born three years after Bucky, six after Steve.

_Margaret dies on her tenth birthday._

Eighteen.

_Sofia dies on her twelfth._

Nineteen.

Forgets she’s personally met their old friends who are long dead, met some of their parents, forgets that she is the oldest person any of them have ever met besides Thor.

Thor. Stark might be her favorite avenger, the two of them and their carefully crafted masks, but Thor brings a stability she didn’t know she needed until the invasion.

_Ivan killed Tatiana._

_Snapped her spine like a twig._

Twenty.

He promised her one night, a year after New York, at three in the morning over a cup of hot chocolate that if she survives the others, or she can’t handle it anymore, he’d take her to Asgard.

She asks him if he can handle it.

_Alexi shooting Nikita because she tried to protect Anna._

Twenty-one.

Twenty-two.

Twenty-three.

A human life-span, a blink of an eye to the Norse god.

_Marina, lost to Siberian winter._

Twenty-four.

He says he lost his friends, his mother, his brother- on multiple occasions- then his father, a sister he never knew he had.

He says aging slower doesn’t stop death.

_Zia filled with bullets a week after her injection._

Twenty-five.

She doesn’t say having people who are going to die of old age before he looks even a year older might be painful regardless of how much death he’s witnessed.

He knows.

_Nelli cut down by a guard before her ninth birthday for saying_ no.

Twenty-six.

He looks her in the eye, and says no.

And she nods.

_Her hand shaking as she stares down the last of the Black Widow’s._

_Her bullet doesn’t miss._

_Yelena falls._

Because she can’t handle it either.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
